Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion

Submitted by Sara Miles on February 5, 2007 - 5:21pm.

We welcome to Beatitudes Blog author Sara Miles. She is a self-described "left-wing journalist, cook and activist, a blue-state lesbian raised as an atheist," who "lived an enthusiastically secular life-until she wandered into a San Francisco church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine, and found herself radically transformed by her first communion." Her new book Take This Bread--A Radical Conversion is the story of her journey to faith, and of her decision to take Jesus' call to feed others literally, by organizing food pantries run by poor people. Learn more here. Phyllis Tickle calls this book "the finest confession of faith I've read in years....an astute assessment of the present intertwining of politics and Christianity in American culture." And our Anne Howard says: "this is the BEST description of Christianity, and the most HONEST description of church life, that I've ever read."

From Take This Bread:

Beyond any single moment of

epiphany, my conversion was a long, complicated and often unconscious journey. When I left the home of my atheist parents I had no reason to think I was looking for God: I just knew I wanted to experience meaning and connection. The material world was my ground: bodily experience the context in which I searched for knowledge and love, political and moral purpose. I looked in all kinds of places, often extreme: in the heat and exertion of restaurant kitchens, in poor people's revolutions and in war zones, in engaged journalism and passionate politics, in love affairs with men and women, in the birth of my child. Something was tugging at me. It drew me from individual experience to collective experience, crossing lines each time-lines of family, of nation, of people unlike me--to find intimate human connection. I saw people betray their friends and sacrifice for strangers; I saw people suffer and starve; I saw people transcend their own limitations to nurture others and become part of communities. Everywhere I saw bodies, and food.

Food and bodies had always been wrapped in meaning for me: they were my way of understanding the world. But it would take decades to have these accumulated experiences make sense in a narrative, much less one I'd call Christian. It took actually eating a piece of bread --a simple chunk of wheat and yeast and water--to pull those layers of meaning together: to make food both absolutely itself and a sign pointing to something bigger. It turned out that the prerequisite for conversion wasn't knowing how to behave in a church, or having a religious vocabulary or an a priori "belief" in an abstract set of propositions: it was hunger, the same hunger I'd always carried.

Eating Jesus knocked me upside down, and forced me to deal with the impossible reality of God. Then, as conversion continued, relentlessly challenging my assumptions about religion and politics and meaning, God forced me to deal with all kinds of other people. In large ways and small, I wrestled with Christianity: its grand promises and its petty demands, its temptations and hypocrisies and promises, its ugly history and often insufferable adherents. Faith for me didn't provide a set of easy answers or certainties: it raised more questions than I was ever comfortable with. The bits of my past--family, work, war, love--came apart as I stumbled into church, then reassembled, through the works communion inspired me to do, into a new life centered on feeding strangers: food and bodies, transformed. I wound up not in what church people like to call "a community of believers" --which tends to be code for "a like-minded club" --but in something huger and wilder than I had ever expected: the suffering, fractious and unboundaried body of Christ.

It may seem crazy, at this point in history, to assert that any religion--much less Christianity, the religion of our contemporary empire, of the powerful and intolerant--can be a force for connection, for healing, for love. It may seem deluded to assert that people can still be fed with this ordinary yet mystical bread, so besmirched and exhausted and poisoned by centuries of religious practice, in ways that will change our own real lives, not to mention history, for the better.

But this is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power which continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right. What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, even my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn't promise to solve or erase suffering, but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God's.

This theology isn't mine alone. It comes from conversations with believers, tradition and Scripture; books and prayer and liturgy. It comes, even more, from my years outside church: from unbelieving and unbelievers, from doubt, from questions that still echo unanswered for me. Faith, for me, isn't an argument, a catechism, a philosophical "proof." It is instead a lens, a way of experiencing life, and a willingness to act.

As the Bible says: Taste and see.

Preorder her book: Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion.

» Sara Miles's blog

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